Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and Criticism

Writing Painters

Daniel Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319406787
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319406794
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is about the historical moment when writers and critics first used the term "realism" to describe representation in literature and painting. While scholarship on realism tends to proceed from an assumption that the term has a long-established meaning and history, this book reveals that mid-nineteenth-century critics and writers first used the term reluctantly, with much confusion over what it might actually mean. It did not acquire the ready meaning we now take for granted until the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, its first definitions came primarily by way of example and analogy, through descriptions of current practitioners, or through fictionalized representations of artists. By investigating original debates over the term "realism," this book shows how writers simultaneously engaged with broader concerns about the changing meanings of what was real and who had the authority to decide this. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Daniel BrownRepresenting Realists in Victorian Literature and CriticismPalgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture10.1007/978-3-319-40679-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Daniel Brown¹

(1)

Oakland Community College, Farmington, Michigan, USA

There appears a common and growing tendency…distinctly towards Realism – as the thing, less easily defined than apprehended, is now called in France. […] In England, the Praeraphaelite movement need but be named.

– William Michael Rossetti, at The International Exhibitions of Art, Paris, 1855

The title ‘realist’ has been imposed on me in the same way as the title ‘romantic’ was imposed on the men of 1830. Titles have never given the right idea of things; if they did, works would be unnecessary.

– Gustave Courbet, ‘Statement on Realism’ (1855)

The terms Real and Ideal have been so run upon of late, that their repetition begins to nauseate; but they must be kept, for all that, till better equivalents are provided.

– David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (1859)

End Abstract

What does it mean for something to be ‘realistic’ or to represent ‘the real’? The question is more than just a scholarly one, as the act of referring to a person or thing as ‘realistic’ or a ‘realist’ has worked its way into the common vernacular with an easy readiness. Generally, its implications are meant to be self-apparent, implying a lack of illusions or pretenses – perhaps in terms of religious beliefs, or just simply social or political niceties. It suggests a direct adherence to some sort of bottom line, an irreducible truth above which all else is fanciful make-believe. Its apparent obviousness is part of its appeal – to refer to ‘the real’ is to refer to something that one need not define or understand any further. To do so risks over-complicating or even contaminating something simple and basic. The term itself is as incontrovertible as the things to which it refers. It simply is.

Of course, scholars have long sought to unravel the authority that realism seems to claim. They have repeatedly praised and maligned it, deconstructed and redeemed it, splintered and multiplied it, and offered countless definitions of what it is and how it works.¹ My aim, however, is not so much to try to offer another understanding, variation, or judgment of the term. Rather, this work attempts to understand the process by which writers and critics first tried to understand the term as it applied to literary and painterly practice, and what was at stake in doing so. What I have found is that those who first tried to understand realism did so primarily through analogy and exemplification, by referencing new movements in the visual arts. As the epigraph by the French painter Gustave Courbet suggests, realism seems to have emerged first in painterly, visual practice, after which writers used the term in an attempt to describe what they saw. Nonetheless, as several of the epigraphs also attest, those who first applied the term did so with an awareness of its limitations, skeptical that it signified anything relevant, reluctant even to apply it or have it applied to their own works. At its inception, realism’s meaning was thus debatable and uncertain, as – we will see – were the parameters of what it could represent, who could claim to practice it, and where its practitioners fit in society. In other words, realism’s formulators used its contested meanings to lay claim to social and epistemological truths that were also uncertain and open to new understandings.

For, just as nineteenth-century critics attempted to understand this seemingly new form of representation, society was changing to an extent that its institutions and members also sought new types of representation. As W.J.T. Mitchell says in Picture Theory (1994), ‘issues like “gender, race, and class,”…and the production of “truth, beauty, and excellence”’ – all things that writers and critics contested alongside definitions of realism – ‘converge on questions of representation’ (p. 3). Furthermore, Mitchell defines ‘representation’ as a ‘master-term’ that ‘activates a set of linkages between political, semiotic/aesthetic, and even economic notions of “standing or acting for”’ (1994, p. 6). Such use, ‘has the virtue of simultaneously linking the visual and the verbal…and connecting them with issues of knowledge (true representations), ethics (responsible representations), and power (effective representation)’ (Mitchell, 1994, p. 6). We can see these linkages in what Antonia Losano calls ‘the scene of painting, which includes not just descriptions of fictional artwork but representations of the act and process of painting…’ and ‘offer[s] fully formed and often radical aesthetic, literary and social critiques’ (2008, p. 3). Although Losano uses scenes of painting to examine the plight of the woman artist, this book uses scenes of painting to investigate the realist artist. As we will see, this figure, as a subject of representation that also represented subjects, became a particularly rich point around which to articulate the continual interplay – as is the central thrust of Mitchell’s book – between not only verbal and visual, but between inner and outer, active and passive, seeing and being seen, speaking and being spoken for.

Defining Realism

Fundamentals

Despite the vast scholarly disagreements on just what realism might entail, the consensus tends to affirm that it developed from – and answered to the needs of – an increasingly secular, empiricist, and individualist society. Although not undisputed, Ian Watt’s seminal Rise of the Novel (1957) has set this baseline definition, arguing that the movements we associate with realism had their philosophical underpinnings in Enlightenment philosophies such as those of René Descartes and John Locke, and literary origins back to eighteenth-century authors such as Daniel Defoe.² As Watt says, Enlightenment understanding that individuals formed their identities by taking in sensory information without the influence of innate attributes had led to an increased concern with particular, sensory details in literature. Literature thus came to focus increasingly on the details of the everyday lives of ordinary people, as opposed to epic heroes or historical figures, situated in highly specific times and places, rather than in universal or mythical circumstances. Literature also started to move away from the idea that human nature was constant and unchanging, and towards a belief that consciousness varied with each individual. Finally, literature came to concern itself mainly with the appearances and actions of material objects and less with metaphysical systems that might underlie those objects, as in a Platonic or Christian view of the world.

Since Watt, George Levine has arguably been one of the most prominent critics to build on an understanding of realism, and his The Realistic Imagination (1983) helped to continue serious, scholarly discussions of the term. Levine accepts Watt’s premise that realism stems from an Enlightenment epistemology but denies – as many poststructuralist scholars since Watt have charged – that there was anything superficial or naïve about it.³ ‘Nineteenth century writers’, he says, ‘were already self-conscious about the nature of their medium’ (1983, p. 4). They wrote ‘with the awareness of the possibilities of indeterminate meaning and of solipsism, but they wrote against the very indeterminacy they tended to reveal’ (Levine, 1983, p. 4). They hoped to ‘reveal a comprehensible world,’ and while they were aware that artistic representation’s ‘relation to reality may be mediated by consciousness,’ they appealed to ‘the shared consciousness of the community of readers’ to authenticate their works (Levine, 1983, p. 18). In other words, realist writers understood that no direct connection exists between words and things, and that an author’s consciousness always mediates representations of objects. However, in spite – or perhaps because – of this awareness, realists aspired to make sense and meaning out of the world around them, and to engage with the community around them to verify their claims. Ultimately, Levine believes that realists were responding to changes brought about by the Enlightenment, industrialization, and speculative capitalism, which threatened the possibility of a solipsistic, nihilistic universe.

Yet, wherever we might place realism’s origins and influences, nobody consciously applied the term to artistic representation until the mid-nineteenth century. According to Pam Morris’s introductory overview, Realism (2003), ‘the term “realism” and the controversies surrounding it did not become current in France until the mid-1850s…’ when Courbet’s paintings ‘sparked off the controversy that publicized the term’ (p. 63).⁴ As the epigraph from art critic William Rossetti (brother to Dante Gabriel and Christina) suggests, writers quickly made connections between the French Realists and the British Pre-Raphaelites, a subject that forms the basis of the next chapter. Although contemporary art historians tend to view the French version of realism (with a capital ‘R’) as its ‘purest’ form in painting and literature, Pre-Raphaelitism was an early touchstone the British used to understand the term.⁵ As the next chapter also explains, Thackeray became a touchstone for realism in British literature, and critics compared him to the Pre-Raphaelites.⁶ However, the Oxford English Dictionary actually cites Modern Painters III (1856), by the preeminent art critic and defender of the Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, as the earliest to use the term in relation to literature or art in English (2009).⁷ Realism’s predominant early use in art criticism suggests its origins in visual representation, but its critics quickly adopted it to draw parallels in literature.

If Ruskin first championed realism in painting, George Eliot was the first to adapt his criticism expressly to the ends of defining it as ‘realism’ per se, after which she would freely apply the term to her own literary works. For example, in an oft-quoted 1856 review of Modern Painters, she says:

The truth of infinite value that [Ruskin] teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.…It is not enough simply to teach truth…we want it to be so taught as to compel men’s attention and sympathy. (qtd in Adam Bede, Eliot, 2005a, p. 582)

In this passage, Eliot shows her clear admiration for the empiricist principles that critics have subsequently connected with realism. Here, she locates ‘truth and beauty’ in the study of ‘definite, substantial reality,’ and not through the ‘vague forms’ that writers and artists had conventionally turned to in order to communicate abstract concepts. Furthermore, Eliot believed that discoveries made through studying nature should ‘compel men’s attention and sympathy’ or, as Ruskin put it, ‘to produce an affecting result’ (qtd in Rosenberg, 1998, p. 51). However, while Eliot thus reveals her debt to Ruskin, she also reveals the central role she herself played in establishing realism as a literary and artistic movement. For, once again, it was not Ruskin but Eliot who referred to his ‘teaching’ as ‘realism.’ Throughout her career, Eliot would take Ruskin’s impassioned but loosely formulated defense of the ‘poetic’ representation of details and lay them down in a much more systematic and coherent doctrine called ‘realism.’

Realism and Visual Representation

Beyond the influence of Ruskin, a large volume of scholarship shows connections between nineteenth-century representational practices, particularly realism in literature and painting, and an increasingly visually oriented society.⁸ Scholars have even argued that the nature of vision was itself radically altered during the nineteenth century, in ways that seem to reflect the overall shift to a realist epistemology. For example, Jonathan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Pre-Raphaelitism as Realism
• 3. Realistic Poetry
• 4. Realist Propaganda
• 5. Realism and the Religion of Doubt
• 6. Realist Con Artists
• 7. Coda
• Backmatter